This article needs a wholesale rewrite. The whole discussion of "licit" and "valid" is very misleading. I will try to find time to do it unless someone else beats me to it. DcnDavid 00:22, 30 Jun 2005 (EDT)

Yeah, this is even a heavily modified version of the Wikipedia article I imported. I left the valid baptism part because I know this comes up a lot in orthodox dialogue, e.g. "Do I have to be baptised again if I convert." Most of the content in that section seems to possibly be written from a Roman Catholic perspective, but could probably benefit from a "Orthodoxification" of the issue. -[[User:Joe Rodgers|Joe( talk » inspect » chat )]] 02:09, 30 Jun 2005 (EDT)

Intro

This article needs a standard intro written for it, a "Baptism is..." sort of thing. —Fr. Andrewtalkcontribs(THINK!) 20:48, November 24, 2005 (CST)

Reading the articles on "Baptism" and "Church"provided by "Easton's Bible Dictionary", included in the free Theophilos software, I came across something interesting. This confirmed what I had been reading elsewhere, namely on the G.O.Arch. site, and on Mr. David Schneider's site. Here are some lines:

"A significant parallel exists between Jewish proselyte baptism (when pagans were converted to Judaism) and early Christian baptism. The contacts between early Christian baptism and proselyte baptism, with the similarities in terminology, interpretation, symbolism, and the rite itself, are especially notable. What is of greatest interest, however, is that the baptism of the early Church followed that of proselyte baptism, in which children and infants were baptized with the convert's family. This is especially significant when one realizes that the very early Church was made up primarily of converted Jews".

The expression used in "Easton's" was actually a little bit stronger:

"When a proselyte was received into membership, he could not enter without bringing his children with him" -- this was probably due to their "semitic totality concept", on which I've read an article on an Protestant apologetics site, namely Tektonics.

On a Romanian Baptist site I found it written in an article that the Jews used 3 immersions in baptism, because that's how many times the word mikvah occured in the Torah (or was it the whole TaNaKh? -- I'm not sure). Luci83ro 17:09, July 23, 2006 (CDT)

Validity of a baptism

In the article, under Validity of a baptism, it is mentioned However, both churches recognize the other's form as valid (in reference to the Catholic Church). Is there a source for that? --Kimon 10:48, June 18, 2007 (PDT)